2 May
2024
2 May
'24
1:06 p.m.
I’m not certain what constitutes the original foundations of
BASIC(Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) but to my knowledge
it began with J. G. Kemeny and T. E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1964.
Apple BASIC and GWBASIC were well established when I began experimenting
with them in early 1980’s. By mid-80’s I was running both on a PC and
Coleco ADAM. I wrote a program using GWBASIC for cataloging my books and
magazines.
Happy computing,
Murray 🙂
On Thu, May 2, 2024 at 6:56 AM Liam Proven via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On Thu, 2 May 2024 at 00:51, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
What would our world be like if the first home computers were to have had
APL, instead of BASIC?
To be perfectly honest I think the home computer boom wouldn't have
happened, and it would have crashed and burned in the 1970s, with the
result that microcomputers remained firmly under corporate control.
I have been watching the APL world with interest since I discovered it
at university, and I still don't understand a word of it.
I've been watching Lisp for just 15 years or so and I find it unreadable
too.
I think there are widely different levels of mental flexibility among
smart humans and one person's "this just requires a small effort but
you get so much in return!" is someone else's eternally impossible,
unclimbable mountain.
After some 40 years in computers now, I still like BASIC best, with
Fortran and Pascal very distant runners-up and everything else from C
to Python is basically somewhere between Minoan Linear A and Linear B
to me.
I think I lack the mental flexibility, and I think I'm better than
most of hoi polloi.
If the early machines had used something cryptic like APL or Forth I
reckon we'd never have had a generation of child programmers.
--
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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